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The 20th anniversary of the Power Mac G4 Cube
- blakesterz 6y agoI remember when this came out watching the big unveiling and absolutely LOVING it. And then. My god, that price. It was so stupidly expensive it really deserved to fail. I don't understand how they could think that would sell many units. It was a super cool looking, super small, super quiet machine that could've really worked well for many people. From the Wired article: "That didn’t happen. For one thing, the price was prohibitive—by the time you bought the display, it was almost three times the price of an iMac and even more than some PowerMacs. By and large, people don’t spend their art budget on computers."
- smnrchrds 6y agoHow much was it?
- weare138 6y agoI found the old press release. The base price was $1,799 for the 400Mhz G4 and $2,299 for the 500Mhz. Adjusted for inflation it's equivalent to $2,783 and $3,557 in today's money. https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2000/07/19Apple-Introduces-Revolutionary/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2000/07/19Apple-Introduces-Re...
- puranjay 6y agoThat's...not as expensive as I had expected. In my country, after taxes, a 16-inch Macbook Pro starts at nearly $3k
- serf 6y ago>In my country, after taxes, a 16-inch Macbook Pro starts at nearly $3k yeah, but the world is now filled with workstation style laptops that can be optioned to 5k+. When the Cube came out it was staggering from a relative personal computer standpoint. (viewed from the lens of HPC, it's all insanely cheap.)
- weare138 6y agoThe big issue was how underpowered it was for the price. It was the same price as a good desktop Mac at the time but with all the limitations of the iMac.
- masswerk 6y agoMind that the iMacs of the time were considerably underpowered G3s with not the best graphics. The Cube was in another league.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dhosek 6y agoIt had a base price of $1799. The contemporaneous iMac was $799. Even a G4 Tower had a lower starting price of $1599. There was definitely a design premium on the cube.
- JKCalhoun 6y agoI suppose the irony is that, had it delivered on quality, it might have lived on as a high-end niche machine for Apple. But when the flaws in the acrylic started being reported, it seemed the emperor was not yet ready for his closeup....
- ogre_codes 6y agoI felt the same. I think at the time I was using the (also awesome looking) "Lampshade" iMac which wasn't as fast but wasn't nearly as expensive either. The conceit on the cube was that people would pay a fat premium for a completely silent, nice looking computer. I'd have paid a premium, but not that much. Correction: The Lampshade Mac was a couple years after the cube. Brought much of the good design aspects of the cube with only a moderately eye watering price. I bought mine as a refurb.
- WWLink 6y agoThe lampshade iMac was my favorite Apple design ever. The only problem - at least with the first ones, was they were TERRIBLE. We bought one for my brother as a birthday gift. It had an 800mhz g4 , a 15" screen, and a 60gb (I think?) 5400rpm(?) hard drive that was so loud I could hear it a mile away (maxtor probably). Sadly stolen. I totally would've kept that computer after he was done with it! It was sooooo cooooool looking!
- reaperducer 6y agoit really deserved to fail Did it "fail?" I'd like to see some sales figures on that, and not just the latter-day revisionist history echo chamber that is the internet these days. I don't understand how they could think that would sell many units. This was during the era when "selling units" wasn't what Apple was trying to achieve. In the time between Steve Jobs' return and Tim Cook taking the helm, Apple was about producing interesting, cutting-edge, quality products for its loyal fanbase. Today, you can measure Apple's success by units sold, because that's how Mr. Cook rolls. But at the time of the Cube, Apple was a different company.
- mcculley 6y agoI have only seen a few in person. They all had cracks from the heat.
- armadsen 6y agoI own two of them. Both work perfectly. One has (minor) cracks, the other doesn't. In any case, I don't think the cracks are really from the heat, it's just something about the plastic. They crack in exactly the places you'd expect, mostly around the load bearing screws.
- mcculley 6y agoI may have wrongly assumed heat because we mostly didn't touch them and used them for build servers. It's still hard for me to imagine it was anything other than the heat.
- strictnein 6y ago> Did it "fail?" I'd like to see some sales figures on that, and not just the latter-day revisionist history echo chamber that is the internet these days. The sales numbers are in the article. They pulled the plug after one year.
- masswerk 6y agoI got me one with the digital Trinitron CRT (which is, BTW, one of the best CRTs ever, while just at 17", and looks just great in its transparent case) and it was perhaps 12% more expensive than my regular office G4. But for this you got the small footprint (as this was my home machine, this was of some importance), no fan noise and really good speakers, and it was even a bit faster than the standard G4. The only drawback was the rather loud factory fitted HD, but if you wound down the HD (which could be done at that time by the press of a single UI button), it was perfectly silent. I simply don't understand the myth of the prohibitive price. Just check the price lists. [1] BTW, I've it still in my office and it's still running flawlessly on OS X Tiger an System 9.2.2. (At one point, rather early on, the capacitive start button failed and was replaced. Otherwise no issues in two decades.) [1] Edit: Mind that the Cube had a special type of a digital RGB connector for the monitor and worked only with the dedicated CRT and the LCD displays. Both displays weren't exactly cheap and you couldn't just use a cheap 3rd party display as a replacement, which added to the price.
- FabHK 6y ago> capacitive start button Yes, that's inaccurate in the article, isn't it? "because it had no On button, a stray wave of your hand would send the machine into action" You didn't "wave your hand", you touched the button. The button wouldn't move, but you did have to press it. (Maybe they changed that from prototype to production? But it definitely wasn't an issue I remember). > I simply don't understand the myth of the prohibitive price. It was pretty expensive at the beginning, but IIRC it came down pretty soon.
- masswerk 6y agoActually, the button even worked at a distance of a couple of millimeters. I think, the original one was even more sensitive, which was the flaw, as it became too sensitive with time. Think ghostly turning off, while working. The replacement one had none of this issues. As it happens, the monitors had USB connection and an on/off button on the front bezel, which was much more practical than the one on the main unit. Because of this, I (and probably most of the owners) used the one on top of the Cube rarely. This was more a design gack. But yes, it was definitely a button, while an unusual one. > It was pretty expensive at the beginning, but IIRC it came down pretty soon. That might be correct. I didn't buy mine in the very first month. Another slight flaw: the material of the transparent cables which came with the Cube is subject to chemical decay and turned a bit sticky. Interestingly, the process stopped and even reversed somewhat. Ah, polymers, always worth a surprise…
- elcapitan 6y ago> Jobs: Yeah, we did one before. Cubes are very efficient spaces. Does anybody know what he means there?
- dhosek 6y agoThe NeXT Cube
- jmkb 6y agoAlso highly hyped, also bombed, but severely influential. IMO has a better claim to "coolest" than the Mac cube does.
- SeanLuke 6y agoWay more so. The thing was made out of solid magnesium. The NeXT Cube had so many amazing features it hurts my head just to think back on it.
- ghaff 6y agoNeXT was conceptually interesting. It had a magneto-optical drive and, as I recall, one of the pitches was that in a world of expensive computers and slow networks, especially in higher education it was an interesting concept that you could carry around a removable disk and essentially make any workstation "your" personal workstation by inserting your disk. And, yes, Jobs was quite the salesman. I wasn't at the original announcement but he reprised the announcement for the Boston Computer Society in Symphony Hall. (Which also says something about the size of the BCS at the time.)
- dhosek 6y agoI remember staying with a friend who was a grad student at Stanford at the time for the 1989 TUG Meeting. He had one of these on his desk (he had been contracted by NeXT to do NeXTTeX). I just remember how blazingly fast and slick everything about that computer was. At the same time, it was super expensive ($6500 for the original NeXT computer) and originally only offered to students and educational institutions. Steve Jobs apparently answered a question about what business people who wanted a NeXT should do if they wanted one with, "Enroll."
- staycoolboy 6y agoDo I have too many blockers running, because there's no article here? Answer: Yes
- dhosek 6y agoPossibly. I saw an article when I clicked the link.
- catalogia 6y agoNo, actually you had too few blockers running. The article loads fine for me with all js/css disabled.
- gaogao 6y agoYou can also clear your cookies. The article was paywalled at first for me.
- neogodless 6y agoThis was my experience. I've got headline, lead image, one line of text and then an author bio! This is with Firefox 78.0.2 running uBlock Origin.
- staycoolboy 6y agoSame here, but apparently this info is worth several downvotes.
- dhosek 6y agoI bought one of these after they were discontinued as a refurb. It was a great semi-portable computer—I'd take it with a cheap flat panel display, keyboard and mouse to band rehearsals and gigs to do recordings. Absolutely silent. At the refurb price it was a pretty good deal. I sold it for not much less than I paid for it to help fund my first PowerBook.
- giantrobot 6y agoWhen the Cube came out I was thinking it would be what the Mac mini became. Instead it was a shitty PowerMac that cost almost as much as a PowerMac. If you wanted to use it for anything but trivial stuff you really just wanted a PowerMac. If your needs were trivial you were much better off with an iMac. Apple's 2x2 product matrix worked pretty well and the Cube didn't fit in it at all. It was a weird expensive mutant.
- timw4mail 6y agoKind of like the Twentieth Anniversary Mac before it in terms of having more style than substance.
- dhosek 6y agoMaybe, but I remember thinking how cool it would be to have one of those. They actually sent someone to your home/office to set it up for you as part of the purchase experience!
- giantrobot 6y agoThe TAM was way more style over substance than the Cube. The Cube did have some utility in that it was virtually silent. I know a lot of audio people that liked them for this reason. The TAM was a $10,000 pure luxury item. That being said I would love to add a TAM to my vintage Mac collection.
- wmeredith 6y agoI think that was the point of both of those devices. Say what you want about these machines, but them and the trash can Mac Pro were all beautiful. you can always get horsepower from a rack mount running Linux.
- dhosek 6y agoThe 2000 PowerMac G4 Tower actually started at $200 less than the Cube.
- masswerk 6y agoTh G4 Cube wasn't weaker than the standard G4 and stood to all the tasks. (It even had faster graphics, but this became a bit of a problem, when the dedicated OpenGL drivers were discontinued and eventually stripped from further OS releases, which showed at least in OS X.) It missed the expandability, but provided a smaller package, low noise and really good sound in exchange. However, you were stuck with the dedicated displays.
- regularfry 6y agoI know more than one person who bought these just because Apple had released new hardware. Totally bought in to the image.
- klyrs 6y ago> These are all specially formulated, and it’s all proprietary, just us. It took us six months just to formulate these plastics. They make bulletproof vests out of it! And it’s incredibly sturdy, and it’s just beautiful! There’s never been anything like that. How do you make something like that? Nobody ever made anything like that! Isn’t that beautiful? I think it’s stunning! Weird. This reads like something straight out of a Trump speech.
- rowanG077 6y agoWhy is that weird? Both Trump and Jobs have/had huge sway with crowds. It's not surprising to me their speech patterns are similar.
- mhh__ 6y agoBecause Trump usually speaks in huge unpunctuated sentences? When did Steve jobs randomly say "Good genes, good genes" while explaining how good he is at nuclear
- sukilot 6y agoJobs died before he got old enough to ge to that linguistic stage, thanks in part to his peculiar views on health science (another similarity to Trump)
- klyrs 6y agoPerhaps because I think that the number of people who idolize both Trump and Jobs is very small compared to those who idolize one or the other.
- mayoff 6y agoI got the same feeling from that part.
- rsynnott 6y agoWell, you wouldn't catch Trump using a word like 'proprietary' (it has five whole syllables!) but yeah, stylistically they weren't a million miles from each other.
- cflewis 6y agoI miss Apple using color. I know they abandoned it because they want their machines to melt away and just have the screen left, but they abandoned fun in the process. Computers don't just have to be windows into a virtual space.
- Eric_WVGG 6y agoIt wasn’t that long ago that you could buy a “rose gold” 12" Macbook, in fact I bought one last spring for my gf on closeout. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see this sort of thing come back once ARM Macs are here.
- FreakyT 6y agoPersonally, what I miss is translucency! I'd really like to see translucent electronics make a comeback, it was always neat to see the inner workings.
- gugagore 6y agoYou might enjoy this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3PfsndsihY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3PfsndsihY It's about electronic devices designed to be used in prison, so they're intentionally made transparent.
- jdofaz 6y agoThese were not compatible with users who set the computer on it's side, or people who would lay papers on top of it. Either way it would overheat (speaking as a former tech support person)
- atrn 6y agoMy Cube cracked the PCBs of two graphics cards before I gave up on it.
- kingkawn 6y agoI knew someone who had one of these, it was awesome
- selimnairb 6y agoThey learned the lesson of the Cube so well, they created the 2013 Mac Pro.
- jtlienwis 6y agoFor a minute I thought it was the Next. But that was a bomb that went off 32 years ago.
- kjs3 6y agoSame here. NeXT was way cooler than any old Power Mac in a pretty box.
- evgen 6y agoYeah, I am guessing you never actually tried to get any work done on one. Nothing like listening to it swap on the floptical while doing a big compile. CHUNKA-CHUNKA-CHUNKA...CHUNKA-CHUNKA.
- kjs3 6y agoI actually had a lab full of them. I said they were cool, not fast. :-) Most everyone I knew who had one added a SCSI hard drive real quick to their NeXT cube and moved stuff like swap there, and eventually folks figured out how to replace the optical as the boot drive. If you were desperate, you could swap to NFS which while not much faster was usually smoother (and quieter) than swapping to the optical.
- abruzzi 6y agoI actually still have my Cube. I haven't powered it on in years, I can't bring myself to throw it out, but I can't figure anything useful for it to do. I have other PPC macs that are in regular use, but its mostly to support hardware that never made it to intel. Since I cant stick a PCI card in the Cube, it just sits there.
- tyingq 6y agoIt makes a pretty tissue box. https://www.applegazette.com/wp-content/uploads/g4cube_tissuebox-550x733.jpg https://www.applegazette.com/wp-content/uploads/g4cube_tissu...
- mariodiana 6y agoI don't remember the exact quote I read, but someone back then noted that it was a supercomputer the size of a box of tissues, and that it was (and I'm going by memory now): One of the few things that makes the Year 2000 what it was cracked up to be.
- scott_s 6y agoCurious - people have long drawn parallels between Apple and Nintendo's aesthetics for hardware and strategy, but I never realized how close the G4 Cube (July 2000) was to the Nintendo GameCube (September 2001). I still think the GameCube is the most aesthetically pleasing console.
- CoolGuySteve 6y agoYeah, for all the love the G4 Cube gets, the Gamecube was much, much, smaller, had more efficient cooling, similar specs (minus the disk drive), and was 1/10th the price. The 1T-SRAM and EDRAM framebuffer caches in the Gamecube were also much more interesting on a technical level. Considering how poorly Aqua ran on the Mac's of that era, the Gamecube's 3D hardware probably would have been better suited to OS X than Apple's own. It's a far superior design imo.
- reaperducer 6y agothe Gamecube was much, much, smaller, had more efficient cooling, similar specs (minus the disk drive), and was 1/10th the price How many people ran Photoshop or did desktop publishing on a GameCube?
- CoolGuySteve 6y agoHonestly, Resident Evil 4 was far more computationally intensive than anything Photoshop does. It's applying thousands of texture filters and transformations in real time and then mapping them to polygon surfaces with lighting transforms. It's all software, some of it just costs more.
- puranjay 6y agoMore hardware needs to have handles. I really can't think of any moderately large product that wouldn't be improved by a simple handle
- perardi 6y ago
- chaoticmass 6y agoBack when this came out, I was 15, and still stuck in my zealous fanboyism against anything Apple-- but even I had to admit it looked cool.
- _threads 6y agoI love it but I’m pretty sure it was built by workers in a factory, but our world only remember names of so-called « leaders »
- snorkel 6y agoThe Cube also had bad market timing. The dotcom bubble was bursting so the market for luxury office equipment was quickly drying up. Aside from that everyone said it looked like a overpriced tissue box.
- didip 6y agoheh, one of my classmates had this. His cat loves sitting on top of it, causing it to shutdown unexpectedly.
- valuearb 6y agoThis is a testament to the greatness of Steve Jobs. It’s not just your successes that define you when you constantly are pushing the envelope.
- olliej 6y agoIn fairness it was an astonishingly pretty machine, and I've always really wanted one - even today when it would be totally useless. Who cares if it would power cycle on sufficiently hot days :D
- kyuudou 6y agoNow I wonder if the Cobalt Qube[1] was inspired by this... 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_Qube https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_Qube
- Izkata 6y agoA hint of the coming future: > “Do you really want to put a hole in this thing and put a button there?” Jobs asked me, justifying the lack of a power switch. “Look at the energy we put into this slot drive so you wouldn’t have a tray, and you want to ruin that and put a button in?”
- thought_alarm 6y agoThe Cube with matching LCD monitor and USB keyboard was way ahead of its time. A premium product at a premium price. The problem was software. Apple did not have the operating system to justify such a premium product. MacOS 9 was laughably dated, slow, and unstable, especially compared to Win2000 and WinXP, and OS X was years away from being ready. The hardware writes a check that the software can't cash. Anyone would have been better with a PowerMac or a Win2k machine. I own a Cube, and with OS X 10.4 installed it is a completely different machine. It boots faster than a modern Mac, and is light years ahead of aged Mac OS 9 and the early versions of OS X. It feels utterly modern, and takes full advantage of the tight integration between the hardware, LCD monitor, and USB peripherals. Unfortunately for Apple, OS X 10.4 was released 4 years after the Cube was cancelled. I think that if Apple had OS X 10.4 ready in 2000, we would look back at the Cube in a different way.
- trm42 6y agoGood point about the software. Cube was published when Mac OS X was in its infancy. Ended up doing some expo gig where we presented it with the Mac OS X Public Beta running Mac OS Classic version of Photoshop. The Cube was so cool for its time and it still looks good, a lot better than most of the modern PC gear. Opening it was also really cool. It just felt like magic when everything else in the market was basically big, ugly beige boxes which required force, trickery and bloody fingers to open and modify the components. I wish they would make a new version with some Mac Mini hardware. Funny thing about the Cube. It has a place for a fan but as the article mentioned, it didn't have it in production builds. There are still some aftermarket kits to retrofit the fan in place :) Been still thinking about buying one to run Mac OS PPC Classic apps...
- everdrive 6y ago10.4 was such a beautiful operating system. I really believe that Apple had the best operating system out there for the short window that 10.4 was around.
- masklinn 6y ago10.4 was OK but for my money 10.6 was better.
- heelix 6y agoI was gifted one of these long after they hit their EOL. I plan to turn it into a normal x86-64 box since the form factor.. with just a minor bit of dremel work, should fit an ITX board. As a size comparison, upside down with an ITX on the bottom. https://i.imgur.com/W1BTU4u.jpg https://i.imgur.com/W1BTU4u.jpg
- em-bee 6y agoi like that idea. i got a cube off ebay some 15 years ago and was running it with linux as a home server almost a decade. i still have it and i love the form factor. giving it new life would be great. do share on HN when you get serious with this.
- Lammy 6y agoPlease don't gut a working rare classic computer :(
- heelix 6y agoThe fact that it still runs and can even connect to the net (however unsafe that may be with its current state) has delayed the project. The power supply is flaking out. When the magic goes, it goes. One of the more amazing things was the monitor. It manages to power itself via the DVI cable.
- Lammy 6y agoYeah, the internal DC/DC board is known to die if you load the machine up with a CPU/GPU upgrade, even worse if you use the ADC monitor too. It's not cheap, but Artmix makes an upgraded replacement. I promise if you get into modding the Cube it will be a million times more fun than turning such a rare machine into Yet Another Intel Box ;) https://artmix.com/products/product/stratos-technology-powermac-g4-cube-high-power-vrm-unit/ https://artmix.com/products/product/stratos-technology-power...
- mumblemumble 6y agoI had one of these, once upon a time. The model with the capacitive power button. Great machine, but it sure was annoying when people would come by my desk to talk to me, and accidentally put my computer to sleep by absentmindedly resting a hand on a convenient surface.
- paultopia 6y agoThat kind of move is always Apple's big failing---super-expensive, years ahead of its time but not enough years ahead (and quickly self-cannibalized by better yet cheaper products), marquee products. They did that with the Lisa, and arguably with the Newton too. Though I guess the Newton wasn't Jobs's fault, like the others were. I really wanted a cube when it came out though.
- gnicholas 6y agoFor me, the cool thing about the Cube was that I could bring it home from college in a carry-on suitcase. At the time, the laptops had G3 processors, and the G4 towers obviously didn't fit in a suitcase. But I could travel with my G4 Cube (500 MHz with DVD) in my rolling luggage and my Apple Studio Display (15", with tilt arm detached) in my shoulder bag. It was the only way to get G4 performance in a semi-portable form factor. This was great because when I went home for Christmas, I had my computer (and DVD player) in my room. And when I went to summer internships, it was easy to bring my digital life with me. I loved it!
- Lammy 6y agoI did this just a couple years ago when I found a Cube while traveling! https://i.imgur.com/H8UxYCj.jpg https://i.imgur.com/H8UxYCj.jpg
- nickbauman 6y agoThe cube was a rehash of the NeXT Cube. Why do that again?
- als0 6y agoBecause the NeXT Cube was an undeniable work of art...
- sigzero 6y agoI loved my cube. <3
- gigatexal 6y agoI still hope they bring this back with the new Apple silicon macs. I loved the cube!
- FabHK 6y agoThe Cube was great, particularly once OS X came out in the following year. But even before that, iTunes was released, and with the Harman Kardon Soundsticks [1,2] (two little speakers and a subwoofer) it was a brilliant machine for the living room. Looked great, you could work on it, surf, listen to music and watch DVDs. You could set iTunes to automatically rip CDs it hadn't ripped before, IIRC, and with the nifty mechanism it was really pleasant to pop in your entire music collection one at a time and turn it into mp3s. Rip, mix, burn [3]. And then the iPod came out in 2001 as well, and your entire collection was on the damn thing in minutes (over FireWire). Nowadays, this is all a matter of course, but back then it was way ahead of the rest. (Should have bought Apple shares...) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundSticks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundSticks [2] https://medium.com/@unmakr/moma-approved-harman-kardon-soundsticks-ii-teardown-f5ef983185cb https://medium.com/@unmakr/moma-approved-harman-kardon-sound... [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0ZWuhcM7t4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0ZWuhcM7t4
- atkailash 6y agoI loved this, the iMac that was all colorful, and the sunflower one. Every time I see them I look into how to use it as a chassis Speaking of...should look into making one of them into some RaspberryPI thing
- KingOfCoders 6y agoLoved by G4 Cube. Was my first OSX machine. Liked the hardware extension scene with CPU extensions and new graphics cards that could work in that small space and without active cooling.
- eucryphia 6y agoI did fall in love with one of these as soon as I saw it in the University shop. But the sticker price was simply unaffordable, our worplace ran MS Windows and I had a house to pay off.